Inmotion Hosting Review 2018 Edition

I wanted to conduct an Inmotion hosting review for a long time as I heard excellent things about it.

First impressions last a long time they say, and while this is not always true, I can say that my first experience with these guys was indeed positive.

The “Toyota of Web Hosting”

They seem to be very flexible with their services as there is a variety of hosting packages so that we can start the type of website that we want. So lottery winner or on a budget, we can get online. It is still Inmotion hosting. It’s like Toyota among the cars – reliable and good value for money.

But of course I don’t base business decisions on reputation and first impressions – for something that we pay on a regular basis I want to make sure I get something of equal value, and I’m sure a lot of you would agree with me on this.

So one right way to approach it would be to take it for a test drive, of course without ties. With most internationally operating web hosts they have a 30-day money back guarantee. So basically we have the chance to decide whether we like it or not.

Refund Conditions

I had concerns at the beginning regarding these money back guarantees; it just sounds too good. But as I learned later my fears were false, and they give back the money indeed.

Of course, there are some unique situations where we don’t get back the full amount.

These include:

If you got a free domain from them also with your hosting then obviously they will deduct the price of the domain name if you decide to leave them and take the domain name with you to another host. So free domain names are free until you stay with them.

I’m not saying this because I know you will leave Inmotion, as a matter effect I’m more convinced that if you give them a try, you’ll stay with them. I’m saying this because I want to prepare for every situation and I want you to know these things.

The Human Factor

The hosting industry is getting more and more saturated, so service providers are trying to come up with features that differentiate them from the rest of the market.

It is a general phenomenon in all industries I’d say, but in hosting is becoming harder by the day to accomplish this as if one provider comes up with something soon enough others will follow.

But there’s one thing that they can’t emulate – the human factor. People build organizations; it is a people’s business. It is essential, at least as crucial as the product or service itself.

The experience that the customer has with a representative of the service provider is crucial apart from the service. Inmotion seems to do a great job in hiring the right people for the proper roles.

From my interactions with them, they come off as a flexible team from top to bottom.

Again, I’d like to stress that this is my experience and someone else might have a different experience with them.

Diversify Your Sources

I always advise to get information from several sources, don’t take my word for it, don’t believe the next website either. But if I’m just partly right, Inmotion is still among the best web hosts.

Let’s go through on some of the leading technical aspects that are sensible to cover.

Hosting Industry Pioneers

So the answer to the above question is quite straightforward if we dig a little deeper. I remember a few years ago when it was not so popular as it is now for web hosts to offer Swift Servers and Speed Zones to enhance their services. InMotionHosting was already doing it; it was dominating in a sense.

Now if we look around we see that more and more providers are trying to carve out a unique place on the market for themselves utilizing techniques related to the above mentioned.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, but with this in mind, we tend to get to the legitimate question of whether Inmotion is competitive now? What’s the current situation?

It is an important question because in technology one year can equal five years in another industry, it develops so fast. So it might be that a web host was dominant five years ago having a competitive advantage in some areas, and five years later it’s just standard, or what’s worse, is lagging.

Controversial Because I Made Errors

I wrote this article in late 2013, and back then I did some testing on how specific web hosts performed, uptime and speed wise.

To my surprise (and horror) InMotion was not performing the way it should have been. So I used those data in that version of this article, and it turned out to be a somewhat negative opinion filled with doubts.

We all know that in technology things change fast, that is why I regularly update my content with the new info. Well, at least I try.

I made some errors though when I did that testing. I wasn’t testing a client website, but their official site, and with many web hosts their website is not on the same server as their client’s sites.

Another one of my shortcomings was that it was at the time when Inmotion changed their website from their old design. So it might have been that this plays a role in the fact that there were more extended and more frequent downtimes than I awaited.

Pricing Hasn’t Changed

Prices haven’t changed, they are the same as they were two years ago.

If you check out the two images below, one from 2013 and one from 2015 you will see that the price of the first plan has changed a bit, but only to the eye.

The background to this is that they have upgraded every one of their plans so that now every package comes with SSDs. And SSDs are awesome.

Why?

SSDs can multiply the speed of a website. SSD servers don’t have moving parts in them, so they perform many times better than traditional servers.

Prices are one of the most critical factors for the majority of us.

But I learned that it’s not the price that we should focus on, that doesn’t necessarily offer the right information – it’s the value we should look on.

Now from that standpoint, InMotion stands out because SSDs are not a standard for every web host. There is only a small percentage of them at the moment which includes them without any additional fee.

Tip: to get ahead of your competition, choose a web hosting plan that offers SSDs. Studies show that users stay longer on faster websites. Also, page speed is a ranking factor in search engines too so that you will enjoy massive benefits. InMotion includes it for free, create a lightning fast website today!

Max Speed Zone – US Clients In Advantage

With Max Speed Zones based on Multiple Data Centers, you can use the closest one to your area. It can prove crucial to how a website is performing; if your place and your visitor’s place is closer to the data center to you, the user experience will be better.

Here’s a little bit of insight into how this works:

Inmotionhosting has two data centers as you can see, so depending on where a customer is from, one can enjoy better speed. The eastern data center for N. America, Europe, Africa, South America. The western for Australia, Asia, South Pacific and of course N. America

Another way of Inmotion speeding up websites is by peering. It allows the connection to be direct between servers. They’ve done this by teaming up with major ISP’s and peering exchanges.

You can see the basic scheme of how it works below.

Scheme of Peering – Direct Data Connections

Thought Experiment – A Happy Ending Story

Ok, let’s suppose that a friend of mine asks me to tell him or her if I’d consider InMotion a contender for a decent web presence, I would point out these:

In my opinion, InMotion will not only provide the right tools to have a proper web presence but a strong one with features that your competitors have to pay extra.

They support the top Open Source software and community making it easier to get online with less investment yet high quality.

Top of the line technology – I think this is one of the differentiator points: they invest seriously in their technology, all their data centers are Category A, PCI compliant with 99.99% uptime and a not average 90-day money back guarantee. The general is 30 days.

And lastly, they are there for you in the long run. A lot of web hosts don’t offer the opportunity to host websites on the whole spectrum – from the smallest personal blog to the large enterprise site. Here we can do this, without having to leave them when websites get bigger.

But as I always say, you should read other opinions too; there’s plenty on the web, see other people’s opinion. But as far as my current view goes, if I’m just half right, you would still say it was an excellent choice.

Support Seems To Be Up To Par

It’s tough to speak about support in web hosting generally, and unfortunately, most, if not all web siteswho deal with web hosting commit a mistake.

It is a crucial point because if in a case of emergency we have to wait 15 minutes, for example, it can mean a lot. And in reality, there is no perfect web host. Sooner or later you will have to contact them. So ideally, we have to strive to minimize this time.

What I mean by this ‘error’ is that we have to make a difference between two types of support: the general (sales) support and the technical support.

Now if you are not a registered customer you will not be able to test the real stuff in most cases, and testing sales response times is not informational – because naturally, every hosting provider tries to respond fast to sales inquiries because they want to make as many sales as possible.

An interesting fact to note when it comes to technical-support is that a lot of web hosts outsource their support activity (to Asia usually), and in my experience, there is some correlation between this practice and quality of the support service. The good news is that InMotion does not preach this method, their support is US based. It results in a prompt and professional response in times of need as my research show from customer reports and other websites.

Web Design And Marketing Services Are Not For Me

I don’t know how people feel about it, but I would not use my web host’s web design and marketing services. Honestly, it comes off as an upsell.

I don’t want to blame Inmotion though, it wouldn’t be fair, so it’s best to note that this is a common practice with a lot of web hosts. And yes there might be instances where this serves customers, but it’s more than likely a tiny percentage.

At the end of the day in the name of a complete service, there is nothing wrong with it.

Performance Tests Are Positive

As I mentioned earlier in this article, in an earlier version of this article I made some mistakes when testing their performance. I was planning to do an updated version of course.

So to test more than one installation, I’m using builtwith.com to find many websites hosted by InMotion, and as you will see, I chose three of them and tested their speed. I will also setup uptime testing with Uptimerobot, but I would like to test uptime for at least a month to get a better picture. So the bottom line is that I will include that part later. In the meantime check out the speed testing results.

Test A – The first website that I will run a speed test is rayshesstoytrucks.com. It is a standard e-commerce website running on WordPress. Results: minimum: 176ms; maximum: 184ms; average: 179ms.

Without being over enthusiastic, I have to admit that this is an outstanding result. Let’s see the other two.

The last two websites are hosted on VPSs; the first one is on the shared account. We can see a little bit of difference, but not that much. Basically, with all of them being way below 0.3ms is fantastic.

As I said, there is no perfect web host, this is where people get it wrong, but let me tell one thing: you can’t go wrong with InMotion.

So go ahead, give them a try, make use of the 90-day money back guarantee. And if half the way you feel like this is not your plate, you will have plenty of time to get your money back and look for another one – but I have a gut feeling that this won’t happen.

A Feature That I’m Personally Fond Of

I usually don’t advocate the use of too many additional services when acquiring hosting, but InMotion has this thing called Launch Assist that I find very useful.

From the point of view where we don’t want to spend time or just don’t have the know-how to configure virtual private servers or dedicated ones, this can come handy.

The good thing is that in the case of dedicated servers Launch Assist comes for free.

So how does it work?

You just tell them how you want you’re to configure the server, or if you are new to the whole process, they will set it up according to your needs.

They will also help moving websites, should you have such a request. The same is valid for reseller plans. But it doesn’t stop here: they will also install applications, optimize them. For more details, visit their official website.

Forward-Looking Green Data Centers

I think that we’ve reached a point where this aspect becomes very important. I know that this is not something that makes the service better, we as users can’t experience any difference between having a green data center or just a classical one. But I find it extremely important as I always made sure that I host my websites with a provider that pays attention to this area of business.

Fun fact: InMotion was the first provider to implement a method that uses Computer Room Air Conditioners only partially in the cooling process that is needed to maintain the service in the Los Angeles area.

Conclusion

The above and my dealings with Inmotion hosting put them at the top of my list of “to go” web hosts. A reliable web presence and decent prices are a given with this provider with outstanding service value.

So if you want your web presence to be in the hands of fine folks like these, head over to InMotion hosting and get started with your online journeys.

I’ve seen too many reviews which were all saying the same basically. I also know that they were not telling the truth as all of them recommend every web host. It was not Inmotion hosting, but I’m just wondering, why would it be different in this case? While you’re definitely made some effort to talk about the negatives too, who knows how many other negatives are there and you’re just not talking about it? Either cause you don’t want us to know about it or you’re not aware.

But thanks for the review anyways, it does help at the end of the day.